Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 276, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 November 1919 — HOW ABOUT 'DAD'? [ARTICLE]

HOW ABOUT 'DAD'?

Writer Makes Plea That Is Worth Consideration. Too Often Father of Family Glvea All With Comparatively Little, Return From Those • He Loves. " It is not father’s plaint. He rarely admits that he has cause for complaint. So someone must do It for him. Imagine, if you please, a successful man of 50. Besides his prosperous business or profession, he has laid up an independence. He has fine character, unblemished reputation, good health and apparently Ideal family relations. Yet he is not happy. Possibly he knows what is the matter; more likely he doesn’t; but we do. It is those seemingly ideal domestic relations. Of his three children, his son, a fine young man of 19, promises, after the subsidence of youth’s effervescence, to follow worthily in his father’s footsteps. But there is no comradeship between them. The boy greatly respepts his father, and his love might be a stay in the crises of life, but is small comfort in its dead levels. He would as likely think of chumming with Abraham. His elder daughter is "out,” his younger still a school girl.’ He has given them every advantage of education, pays their bills, keeps open house for their company, sometimes boarding visiting girl frtends for weeks. He has been driven from the parlor to the library by the force of that deeprooted American delusion that social pleasure Is strictly for yoyng people. To be sure, nts gtria sometimes take fits of petting him, but the unfortunate coincidence of these spells with calls for some Jresh indulgence will force Itself on his attention, despite his loyal efforts to be fondly blind. And his wife, the one member of his family of his own generation, she who has with him a common past, common interests and a common remembrance of “Love’s Young Dneam,” surely .she Is in perfect accord with him? Surely she sits in the library ■with him? No, she doesn’t. A successful man’s wife often mistakes the deference paid to her for tribute to her own 'charm when in fact it js paid: solely to- her husband’s wife. Occasionally death and misfortune rob her of both husbgnd and money and then she is made to realize how little court is paid to her personality.- But the mistake is quite natural, and she really believes her husband fortunate to possess her. Therefore, when she has given the time and thought necessary to the smooth running of the domestic machinery she fancies she has done her full duty by him. The rest of her energy she gives to her clubs, her limousine, the dressing of her daughters and herself; in fine, to all that pertains to the social standing of the family; never questioning the real happiness of the talented man who is steadily working for the means to give her and her chlldrenthese advantages. She takes it for granted that he is completely satisfied with that vocotion. • But he isn’t. He is human and often love hungry. It is high time his family call their dormant love into active life and give smiles to him now, Instead of tears to his casket. —-Penn*